In a conventional telecommunications switching network, a communications path must be established in a source node and a destination node before data, such as facsimile, email, or voice, can be distributed along the established path. A propagation delay occurs across the network when setting up and releasing a communication path. Conventional telecommunications switching systems, upon deriving a destination of a telephone call, must send a message to a remote database system to request routing information for a particular call. Remote database systems provide a menu of routing information, and routing information is selected from the database system according to the request from a telecommunications switching system.
Code division multiple access (CDMA) systems must support the transport of digitally encoded information that is in packet form. In addition, CDMA systems must support multiple duplicated streams of this information, known as soft handoff, and carry this information in an efficient manner over transport links within the system. Large CDMA systems may require different networking technology. Implementation of an Internet Protocol (IP) based network can solve transparency issues with the network by providing the inter networking function above the physical and transport network layers. The cost of network equipment in a CDMA system is a problem because of the large number of network paths required because of the use of soft handoff. Another problem with the large number of network paths in a CDMA system is the complexity of manipulation and management of these paths in a connection oriented implementation. IP allows a connection less or routed architecture that greatly simplifies network implementation. Unlike other technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), the use of differentiated services to assign and/or control quality of service (QoS) enables this to be done in a connectionless manner in the core network where bandwidth is prevalent.
In addition, a routed network enables a peer-to-peer network element relationship rather than the classical hierarchical network. A peer-to-peer network allows for entity relationships such as client/server which offers improved and flexible possibilities for scalability and network robustness.
It is, therefore, desirable to have an improved method and apparatus for routing packet data in a communications system, wherein the quality of a network transmission between a first node and a second node is increased.